I guess for me this time last month the biggest difference was that I wasn't living under the sort of cloud most people with family in India are living under right now... A few short weeks and a world that seemed to be slowly but surely finding its feet suddenly seems a darker more uncertain place.
But I guess the thing is, if you believe in God, you've gotto believe in God. So far, thankfully, my family have been safe. Long may it continue and I can only pray for peace for so many who have been left bereft. The night does turn to day however, and so one continues to look forward in hope.
Closer to home, (I find the way my use of that phrase has changed over the years telling. But I suppose such is life, a constant progression of small changes that add up.) things seem to be looking up significantly. We continue to make use of the lengthening days. Days where the sunshine has started to feel positively warm! Hints of the coming summer.
This time I decided to give the moss a good fight before all the growing has started in earnest. The many mornings with the rake seem to have a made a difference, but the final outcome seems currently uncertain...
We have continued to go out on the bikes. Although there was the almost customary spring dump of snow that arrested the green from its blossoming march across the landscape everywhere one looks. Not for too long though. The crocuses we the first to fill in some colour in the world, but now more and more flowers, wild and otherwise, are starting to appear.
To be fair the snow and the following freeze, (barely dipping to zero overnight, but I was getting used to the warm so this dip in temperature feels rather colder than it actually is) and the howling winds that seem bent on stealing any warmth the sun might provide, have put a bit of a pause on the cycling excursions. But hopefully that might change sooner rather than later.
On the books front I couldn't really resist dipping my toes back into the Malazan world :). As a sort of compromise between full scale immersion and nothing at all, I decided to get the collected Tales of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas. I finished the first last week and making reasonably rapid progress through the second. Weird and wonderful is probably a reasonable description?!
For one thing, it's strange to be done with stories set in the Malazan world so quickly. But at the same time, there is much that is hinted at. Given that these stories are roughly concurrent with events I read about over two years ago now, I'm probably missing a lot. At the same time, it doesn't feel like that's the point.
There's a sense of so much driftwood, floating, accumulating, and then being washed apart again more or less at random. Yet, in doing so, leaving a sense of a cohesive story arc. Yup, still loving Erikson basically :).
But before that, also read this month's book club book, co-authored by none other than Bill Clinton! Although I have a distinct feeling that he probably just wrote the first and last 5 pages and left the rest to Patterson. I guess I'd give The President is Missing a solid mediocre rating. On the one hand it was a pretty fast read. Good pace to the action. On the other hand, the President never actually goes missing... so you know.. whatever :).
